314 BUREAU OP AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 137 



with his hand to his best advantage to seeme like a Deare, also gazing and 

 licking himself. So watching his best advantage to approach, having shot him, 

 hee chaseth him by his blood and straine till he get him. (Smith, Tyler ed., 

 1907, p. 105.) 



A Santee Indian, from the country midway between the last two, 

 employed the head only. He carried 



an artificial head to hunt withal. They are made of the head of a buck, the back 

 part of the horns being scraped and hollow for the lightness of carriage. The 

 skin is left to the setting on of the shoulders, which is lined all round with small 

 hoops, and flat sort of laths, to hold it open for the arms to go in. They have a 

 way to preserve the eyes, as if living." The hunter puts on a match coat made 

 of deer skin, with the hair on, and a piece of the white part of the deer skin that 

 grows on the breast, which is fastened to the neck end of this stalking head, so 

 hangs down. In these habiliments an Indian will go as near a deer as he pleases, 

 the exact motions and behaviour of a deer being so well counterfeited by them, 

 that several times it hath been known for two hunters to come up with a stalking 

 head together, and unknown to each other, so that they have killed an Indian 

 instead of a deer, which hath happened sometimes to a brother or some dear 

 friend ; for which reason they allow not of that sort of practice where the nation 

 is populous. (Lawson, 1860, p. 44 ; Catesby, 1731-43, vol. 2, p. xn.) 



The Indians of this section — and the same was true of most of those 

 of the Southeast — carefully preserved the bones of the animals they ate 

 and burned them "as being of opinion that if they omitted that custom 

 the game would leave their country, and they should not be able to 

 maintain themselves by their hunting." 



A little farther south, in Georgia, is a small stream, an affluent of 

 the Ocmulgee known as Echeconnee, but on the older maps Icho-cunno, 

 which means, in the Muskogee language, "deer trap." It was so 

 called because the deer used to resort to it for a certain kind of food 

 of which they were fond and the conformity of the banks prevented 

 them from escaping readily when pursued by hunters. 



Speck's informants remembered the use of the stuffed deer head 

 which the hunter "put over his shoulders or elevated on a stick in front 

 of him when he was approaching the deer" (Speck, 1907, p. 22). At 

 intervals during his approach to the intended victim the Indian sang 

 a magic song, given by Speck (1907, p. 19). 



MacCauley heard of deer stalking among the Seminole, but, curi- 

 ously enough, his informants did not speak of using a decoy deer head : 



The Seminole always hunt their game on foot. They can approach a deer to 

 within sixty yards by their method of rapidly nearing him while he is feeding, 

 and standing perfectly still when he raises his head. They say that they are 

 able to discover by certain movements on the part of the deer when the head 

 is about to be lifted. They stand side to the animal. They believe t^at they can 

 thus deceive the deer, appearing to them as stumps of trees. (MacCauley, 1887, 

 p. 512.) 



" "The eyes are well represented by the globular shining seeds of the Pavia, or scarlet 

 flowering horse-chestnut" (Catesby. 1731-1743, vol. 2, p. xii.) 



